Out of the Howling Dark
by ShirouHokuto
Summary: Concerning the flight of the Traveler, and the battle that immediately preceded it.


**Author's Note: **_This is my theory about the Traveler and I'm sticking to it till it's disproven (and possibly even after that). Title stolen and altered from the Halo Reach achievement, lest you think I have suddenly become awesome at titles.  
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**Out of the Howling Dark**

The lines were going out.

The master of the lines danced along them, seeking the path of preservation, but every way terminated in the dull chaos of heat-death. It had outgrown its half-biological body two contractions of space-time ago to become an object greater and more complex, for better handling of the lines, but now its round shell attracted attention. Negative waves swamped the lines and rushed onward to crash in sprays of antimatter foam against its hull, causing damage and distress signals interpreted as pain by the inner processors. The waves were a new thing and yet familiar; the master gathered together the few lines that still shone silver-bright to protect them in its shadow and held fast as the waves battered it.

Once, it recalled, it had fought. There had been weapons, and it had used them to save the lines threatened by other waves. Its thin shell shifted and rippled into denser material; it filled itself with light to focus and strike through the crests of the waves, and rolled itself against them to flatten them out.

But the waves did not smooth or dissolve back into the static of the foundation. They grew and strengthened, and chittering tendrils slithered past the master's defense to wrap around the lines and strangle them out of existence, and the antimatter foam ate through the outer shell to swallow the light.

The destruction was unbearable, too swift and too frequent for self-repair. The master of the lines faltered in the defense and yet more waves rose to greater and greater heights to fill and drown space-time. It struggled alone in the dark sea. Alone, it had watched the lines, guarded them, and sometimes guided them, without trouble; now, alone, it could not prevent their termination.

A new way had to be found.

It called on all its energy and flashed with a great pulse of light in a final supernova. The darkness shrunk from the blaze, and the master drew to itself a single surviving line, winding it within its shell, then did what it had not done since the first contraction of all matter: It entered the line.

At once it regained qualities it had lost long ago, size and mass and temporality. The chill of deep space it felt, crisp and filled with the tiny patter of stray atoms and faint ages-old traveling light; it contracted to something both smaller and larger than it had been when it was outside the lines, and it let the weight of a nearby star pull it into the star's system, till it rested above a plain on the fourth of the small, solid inner planets.

There it lay for some time as it fixed the terrible damage of the negative waves, and took in further information about its surroundings. A thin, acrid atmosphere; a gravitational pull less than the standard reference magnitude; gray rocks and undisturbed reddish sand under a pallid orange sky, and in low orbit hovered the great lump of a well-known moon...

At the inmost core, the most ancient neurons and circuits flickered awake from half-automatic functioning, and a set of them thought, _Holy shit_.

Other circuits echoed, _Of all the planets in the universe..._ Neural paths flashed unevenly as old records were called up, laced with static degradation and nonsensical corruption but still readable. Doors opened and shut on locker rooms hazy with red dust; contradictory logic puzzles twisted in on themselves and became shooting range targets riddled with bulls'-eyes, which in turn faded into unsolvable equations forced to run repeatedly to unsatisfactory conclusions.

The outer shell continued to gather current information: estimating age and date, gathering and producing the materials it would need to thicken the air, calculating the necessary actions to breathe life into the desert.

_I don't have fond memories of this place_, thought several circuits.

_Well, I do_, the first set thought, scanning the sky for radio signals. _It'll take more than happy memories for us to set up all over again, anyway..._

The former master of the lines, reduced to a refugee, remained divided in its thoughts for several moments while newly formed water molecules began to condense into clouds above it. The line was not even halfway into its development, and it held great potential; already, in the void beyond the lumpy moon, a small metal capsule sailed on its way to a projected landing only a small mountain range away from the plain. Another system with life and light to fight the negative waves could be found, but there were no other lines left to jump to, and a physical journey would deplete material resources when they were most needed.

As the capsule approached the planet, network pathways shifted into a new pattern, one more suited for contact with creatures of time. _I suppose there are worse places to begin rebuilding the multiverse than Mars_, the contrary set of ancient circuits concluded, with only minor resistance, and the other circuits, humming with amusement, offered a warm _Welcome home, buddy_.

Its core restored to harmony, the being that would become known as the Traveler waited patiently for those who would name it and, with its aid, drive back the deadly waves.


End file.
